Arcati 2017 Mainframe Survey—Cognitive a No-Show

DancingDinosaur checks into Arcati’s annual mainframe survey every few years. You can access a copy of the 2017 report here. Some of the data doesn’t change much, a few percentage points here or there. For example, 75% of the respondents consider the mainframe too expensive. OK, people have been saying that for years.

On the other hand, 65% of the respondents’ mainframes are involved with web services. Half also run Java-based mainframe apps, up from 30% last year, while 17% more are planning to run Java with their mainframe this year. Similarly, 35% of respondents report running Linux on the mainframe, up from 22% last year. Again, 13% of the respondents expect to add Linux this year. Driving this is the advantageous cost and management benefits that result from consolidating distributed Linux workloads on the z. Yes, things are changing.

The biggest surprise for DancingDinosaur, however, revolved around IBM’s latest strategic initiatives, especially cognitive computing and blockchain. Other strategic initiatives may include, depending on who is briefing you at the moment—security, data analytics, cloud, hybrid cloud, and mobile. These strategic imperatives, especially cognitive computing, are expected to drive IBM’s revenue. In the latest statement, reported last week in DancingDinosaur, strategic imperatives amounted to 41% of revenue. Cloud revenue and Cloud-as-a-service also rose considerably, 35% and 61% respectively.

When DancingDinosaur searched the accompanying Arcati vendor report (over 120 vendors with brief descriptions) for cognitive only GT Software came up. IBM didn’t even mention cognitive in its vendor listing, which admittedly was skimpy. The case was the same with Blockchain; only one vendor, Atos, mentioned it and nothing about blockchain in the IBM listing. More vendors, however, noted supporting one or some of the other supposed strategic initiatives.

Overall, the Arcati survey is quite positive about the mainframe. The survey found that 50 percent of sites viewed their mainframe as a legacy system (down from last year’s 62 percent). However, 22 percent (up from 16 percent last year) viewed mainframe as strategic, with 28 percent (up from 22 percent) viewing mainframes as both strategic and legacy.

Reinforcing the value of the mainframe, the survey found 78 percent of sites experienced some kind of increase in capacity. With increased demand for mainframe resources (data and processing), it should not be surprising that respondents report an 81 percent an increase in technology costs. Yet, 38 percent of sites report their people costs have decreased or stayed the same.

Unfortunately, the survey also found that 70 percent of respondents thought there were a cultural barrier between mainframe and other IT professionals. That did not discourage respondents from pointing out the mainframe advantages: 100 percent highlighted the benefit of the mainframe’s availability, 83 percent highlighted security, 75 percent identified scalability, and 71 percent picked manageability as a mainframe benefit.

Also, social media runs on the mainframe. Respondents found social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) useful for their work on the mainframe. Twenty-seven percent report using social (up slightly from 25 percent last year) with the rest not using it at all despite IBM offering Facebook pages dedicated to IMS, CICS, and DB2. DancingDinosaur, only an occasional FB visitor, will check it out and report.

In terms of how mainframes are being used, the Arcati survey found that 25 percent of sites are planning to use Big Data; five percent of sites have adopted it for DevOps while 48 percent are planning to use mainframe DevOps going forward. Similarly, 14 percent of respondents already are reusing APIs while another 41 percent are planning to.

Arcati points out another interesting thought: The survey showed a 55:45 percent split in favor of distributed systems. So, you might expect the spend on the two types of platform to be similar. Yet, the survey found that 87 percent of an organization’s IT spend was going to distributed systems! Apparently mainframes aren’t as expensive as people think. Or put it another way, the cost of owning and operating distributed systems with mainframe-caliber QoS amounts to a lot more than people are admitting.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.